Nick,
I'm still curious about your answer to a challenge you raised. You wrote,
As one of my graduate students used to [cheerfully] say, but Nick, if
youdon't have an inner life, it's ok to
kill you, right?
Now, my wisest response to this line of argument would be to go all
technocratic and to
Sorry. Misspoke. Don't really make a distinction between human nature and the
human condition. Each is a creation of the other. they are dialectically
intertwined or whatever. So, you cant disagree with me on that point any
more.
So, let's take this occasion to transition to a
Russ,
It's not OK, but only because my relatives and friends would kill your
relatives and friends if you did. Or, to put the matter more precisely, people
who kill other people tend, when social environments are stable, to have had
fewer offspring than those that don't. Ditto Rapists.
Bringing something from a P.S. up to the front:
Nick's ethical
stance would
be based on treating things that act in certain ways as equal to all other
things that act in certain ways, and it wouldn't get much more prescriptive
than that. The
acts he would be interested in would be very
Wow! I never thought I would see the like of it!
[I changed the subject line; even an exhibitionist has his limits.]
n
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu)
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
It's beautiful here back in LA. So this will be short.
I read and enjoyed the book too. But I didn't find the metaphor misleading.
(Perhaps I didn't take the metaphor seriously.)
As a programmer, I'm used to having a program whose operational consequences
depend on things in its environment. As
But as you said, that's not a matter of OK-ness. It's a matter of the
evolutionary environment in which the act occurs. In unstable situations
(according to the research you site) it is OK. So (I gather) there is no
notion of OK as far as you are concerned which is any different from
Nick
Sorry. Misspoke. Don't
really make a distinction between human nature and the human
condition. Each is a creation of the other. they are dialectically
intertwined or whatever. So, you cant disagree with me on that
point any more.
Ah, but it is Human Nature *and* the Human
I just came across this amusing
storyhttp://bluecatblog.wordpress.com/2009/06/21/a-great-story-of-big-banks-losing/that
illustrates what can happen when one takes a metaphor for reality.
-- Russ
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
the following passage caught me eye:
Half the never-ending hurt in this world seems to come from our thinking we
know what other people's intentions are from their actions...
Talk to me a bit about what an intention is to you, what an action is to you,
and how they differ.
Nick
Nicholas
Sorry. I knew it was Eric. My mistake. But this time it really is Nick I'm
responding to.
*nst -- I thought that Russ's position was that one cannot IN PRINCIPLE
know what is truly in another's mind
**Russ*: No. I don't believe that. In fact, I expect that with advanced
enough technology we
11 matches
Mail list logo
